Referral Marketing Tips to Boost Your Business

Muhammad Ijaz - Inbound Professor and Principal at Kips College with a focus on English literature. Also an expert in digital humanities, law and literature, political theory, early modern literature, global studies, and the history of political thought.

Years and years of research has gone into proving that referral marketing is one of the most effective methods when it comes down to the number of sales and conversions a company makes over a certain period of time.

Referral Marketing Tips

People trust relative, friend and colleague opinions more than those of complete strangers. Although, it’s only effective if you know exactly what to do!

1. Provide Customers with Outstanding Service

Step one is of course, to provide your customers with outstanding service that they simply just cannot fault. If you’re successful in doing just that, your customers are more likely to sing your praises to people they know have been searching for the products your company supplies. It’s much easier than you’d imagine – just make sure that from the very beginning of your customers’ experience, you provide them with a stress-free and simple service. Otherwise, they’re bound to look elsewhere for a friendlier experience.

2. Review Your Analytics

Whether you know it or not, you could already be getting referrals from happy customers – take a look at your companies’ Google Analytics as this will give you a much greater insight as to whether or not you’ve gained more referrals, and if so, how many there have been in a certain period of time. Your Google Analytics report will break down how many of those referrals are from visitors and customers, allowing you a much greater understanding of which referring websites are the most qualified and successful. Always remember that, with the aforementioned knowledge, you can contact those sites and lay out a plan to acquire a larger amount of traffic too!

3. Give Customers Reason to Recommend Your Brand

Whether they make the purchase or not, your customers are not obliged to recommend your brand to other people. Unfortunately, for some people, it takes more than the purchase of a quality product for them to recommend a brand – it all falls down to what they think of the product, and why they chose your product over another companies’. If you want your customers to recommend your products and service, you need to give them a reason to boast about their new purchase. Don’t worry though, encouraging brand referral isn’t as hard as it sounds, and you can do it by adding a simple ‘Refer’ button to your website’s main navigation – when customers are eager to share their experience, all they will need to do is click one button and away they go.

Simon Chadwick from Affordable Cars said, ‘Word of mouth is critical to my business, it’s amazing how many people come in and mention someone who’s bought a car from me in the past.’

4. Give Customers a Brilliant Unboxing Experience

Fast and affordable delivery service is the key to getting eager customers to come back for more. But, there’s more than just cramming everything into one box, and sticking a label on the top. Customers appreciate the little gestures more than no effort at all, so just do the little things! Small businesses often share the idea of making the unboxing of their products, well, a little more personal. Why not make your product unboxing Instagram worthy? Just think of it as making a little effort, to get a little in return. You could even include a little ‘thank you’ note to show your appreciation of their loyalty.

5. Implement Referral Rewards

Implementing a referral rewards plan has proven to be one of the most effective methods to encourage customers to share their experience with certain brands. As a business, especially for those smaller businesses, referral rewarding will bring with it more traffic than you’d imagine. Whether your customers have already purchased a product from your company or not, nobody in the right mind would decline a reward offer of money to spend when they refer your brand to people they know – implementing referral rewards has got to be the best way to increase the number of traffic on your website, thus meaning that potential customers could become loyal customers too.